Visa and Mastercard Websites Taken Down By Hackers

Visa and Mastercard are just two of the world’s famous payments technology companies. They facilitate electronic fund transfers throughout the world by branding several credit cards. Just recently, both of their official websites were attacked by hackers.

There has been a report called to BBC that a payment firm which is linked to Mastercard that its customers has experienced “a complete loss of service”. Morever, the Mastercard’s SecureCode had been disrupted. Mastercard has acknowledged the problem and confirmed that they are indeed having “a service disruption” involving its SecureCode.

“Our core processing capabilities have not been compromised and cardholder account data has not been placed at risk. While we have seen limited interruption in some web-based services, cardholders can continue to use their cards for secure transactions globally,” according to Mastercard.

Visa’s website also experienced the same case but was later on restored according to spokesman Ted Carr. He further said that its processing network, which handles cardholder transactions, was working normally.

There has been a twitter account known as Operation Payback which has been tweeting that Visa was taken down. This account was immediately suspended by Twitter afterwards. The social networking site declined to comment of the suspension though but there has been a report that the last tweet of the account has included link to a file containing consumer credit card information.

These things happened after both of them withdrew their service to the controversial website Wikileaks. This group of hackers which has been called Anonymous has claimed to be targeting all the groups which have left Wikileaks lately. They would include those prosecutors who are acting in a legal case against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Several attacks has been claimed including the Swiss bank, PostFinance, which closed the account of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. In short, they would be attacking anyone with “an anti-Wikileaks agenda”.

A member of Anonymous having the codename Coldblood said that websites that are bowing down to government pressure have become their targets. It further stated that the idea is not to wipe them off but to give the companies a wake-up call. It has acknowledged the attacks and further said that they may hurt people trying to get to these sites. However, it is “the only effective way to tell these companies that us, the people, are displeased”.

Follow us on Twitter to get free up-to-date news via tweets from the World Correspondents, or you can subscribe to us by entering your e-mail below. You can confirm your free subscription by clicking the confirmation link that will be sent to your e-mail address. Once you've confirmed, then you're good to go.